Only on Kickstarter could a $2 billion acquisition be considered an abject failure.

On Tuesday, Facebook announced it had purchased Oculus, the virtual reality headset maker and darling of Kickstarter. The moment, celebrated by Oculus’ founders and investors was widely vilified by the very community that jumpstarted the business two years ago, when it raised $2.4 million from more than 9,500 Kickstarter users.

On Oculus’ blog and other online forums, including Facebook, game enthusiasts and general Facebook-haters ripped Oculus, calling it a sell-out and a traitor to its original mission to change the world of virtual reality as a startup.

Many users announced plans to cancel pre-orders. Some argued that Kickstarter should pay them a percentage of the deal—although Kickstarter explicitly forbids the transfer of stock or financial returns to backers. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently working on relaxing rules related to crowdfunding, which may soon allow the average person to receive stock for small Kickstarter-esque investments—but not today and certainly not for Oculus.

The pain wasn’t purely economic.

“I feel cheated. I backed a vision of what I wanted gaming to be in the future. Now all I want is my money back,” said a user named Grant Wilkinsonon the Oculus Kickstarter page.

On Reddit, a giant repository for interesting items on the Web, several anti-Oculus-Facebook posts hit the front page—a difficult feat for any news event.

A popular item circulating the Web on Wednesday afternoon was a GIF of an edited scene from “Futurama,” in which the characters use Oculus-like devices to step into a virtual-reality world where they have to fight against Facebook advertisements. Another trending post, which juxtaposed an old quote from Oculus CTO, John Carmack, on how Oculus appeals to the “hacker/maker crowd,” with a quote from Mark Zuckerberg about Oculus is a new communications platform, garnered roughly 4,500 comments.

So why the hate?

The tension highlights the incompatibility between the perceived indie spirit of Kickstarter and big corporate buyouts.

According to users, Kickstarter is framed as the home for passion projects. It’s a place, where artists can find the means to publish quirky films—that no one else will fund—or for tinkerers to build things like a better microscope or a new platform for virtual reality. Although backers don’t get equity—instead they receive gifts like T-shirts, or the product itself, for donations—many projects pull them in as almost mini-founders, using their feedback to guide creative and product decisions. On the homepage, there’s a splashy image of “Veronica Mars” star Kristen Bell (a movie of the television show was funded via Kickstarter), with the inspiring words: “91,585 people made this happen.”

A Kickstarter spokesman declined to comment.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said he understood why customers were frustrated, and said he likely would have been too if he were in their shoes.

But, he said, the team had already given up total control of the company when it agreed to a $75 million investment round with Andreessen Horowitz. So, Facebook was a logical next step that gave it capital and infrastructure necessary to make the device and sell it for a low price.

“We were already in a way not independent,” he said. “A lot of people don’t understand how much money it takes to build things—especially to build hardware.”

For many backers, Tuesday’s deal was a rude wake-up call, a sign that even the most ambitious projects may not be a success – at least in the way the community intended. And at the end of the day, the community has little say.

“There is a sense that the backers are kind of the board of directors,” said Zachary Reese, a Kickstarter user who gave Oculus $100, and got a t-shirt and poster in return. “No one sent me an e-mail, asking if this was OK.”

Reese, a freelance new media artist, has invested in roughly 30 projects, but says he will now be more cautious. He says he’s frustrated that Oculus is now part of a company that has a mixed record on user privacy issues and third party developers.

“I’ll be wary of anything that’s positioning itself as a platform,” he says.

“Now, do I really want to give up hundreds of dollars to become just another angel investor who doesn’t have any equity?”